Neurodivergent

I discovered some new things about myself this week. I've known for a few years now that I have dyspraxia, a developmental coordination disorder. It's the reason why the fiddly petrol cap on my new car caused enormous anxiety for the first six weeks I owned it and why I fell flat on my face in the middle of a PE lesson at work last week. I think there is at least one moment every single day when I struggle with something delicate or trip over.

I've lived with these issues all my life and over the last five years since discovering the cause I've begun to understand it. I've also been aware that dyspraxia is more than just being clumsy and that it affects my life in other ways, but my understanding of this side of things is limited. If I spot an article about dyspraxia I tend to read it because I usually learn something and occasionally I find one which teaches me a lot.

'Studying with dyspraxia' was published on The Guardian online this week- I'm going to explore the article a little and how it relates to me so don't feel you need to read it but I've put the link in as it may be of interest. It was this sentence which particularly grabbed my attention:

"...dyspraxia is about mental processing as much as physical coordination, and affects everything from the way I read to how I organise my thoughts".

I've never quite thought that it affects me quite so holistically. The article interviews several people with dyspraxia including MP Emma Lewell-Buck and her comments could frankly have been written by me:

"I knew there was something very different about me, and it massively impacted by confidence. Dyspraxics are often the innovators: we come up with the ideas nobody else would think of. I'd be desperate to say something in class, but I was so sure I was wrong that I'd just sit there, bright red, and not put my hand up".

I also felt different at school and I never quite understood it. One of my appraisal targets at work is actually to speak up with my ideas because I find doing so really difficult, though working within a strong team makes it easier.

The woman who wrote the article discusses how she struggled to understand academic texts at university and became adept at focusing on one or two sentences from which she could extract ideas. That's exactly how I worked- for most assignments I'd create a document with ten to fifteen sentences from various academic texts which I'd then turn into an intelligent-sounding essay. It's probably not the best way to work but it seemed to do the job for me.

She also writes that she never planned essays and that her ideas simply mushroomed out of each other. I planned one assignment at uni and I failed it. My technique was always just to sit down and let my brain flow and that's also what I'm doing right now as I write this. It's probably the reason why I usually finished my assignments before my peers and I'm considering the possibility that it is what helps me to be a decent writer. Sometimes I have almost no idea what I'm going to write in a blog post but once I start it flows out of me.

This is something of a change for me. I've always considered dyspraxia to be something which only affects me negatively. But as I considered this article I thought that there are some really good aspects too. The free-flowing way my brain works is pretty great. I am something of an innovator and do regularly have ideas which people say are good. I've since discovered that people with dyspraxia usually have great empathy, something I consider myself to have. The author of the article puts it in a way I really like:

"people don't understand how [specific learning difficulties] can coexist with excellence".

It turns out dyspraxia isn't simply a curse, it has some amazing qualities too.